


My Fair Lady

by YurikoNeko (AlaxxisSade)



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Canon - Manga, Feels, Fluff, Gen, More Fluff, Past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 11:31:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3568079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlaxxisSade/pseuds/YurikoNeko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the servants haunted by their past meet their future mistress... She helps them make peace with their present.<br/>[A LOT FLUFFIER THAN THAT SOUNDS]</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Fair Lady

**Author's Note:**

> Tied in closely with the manga chapter 100, so yeah, this is at least 2 months late. Still, enjoy!

_“He ran through the forest faster than a hare.”_

The young servant boy ran down the steps, three at a time.

                _“He was stronger than a deer.”_

With one push he threw the large oak doors back on the hinges.

                _“That blond boy…”_

His golden hair billowed in the morning wind. He was still getting used to the weight, the warmth over his head.

                _“…resembles you, don’t you think?”_

“Baldroy! Mey-rin!” He burst into the kitchen, panting not out of exertion, but excitement.

                “Whoa, kid, what are you—”

                “Not ‘kid’!”

                Not Subject #12 either, he’s--!

                “Finnian!”

                _“…is the name I want to give you.”_

He has a name, a nice name, a name that the Young Master thought of…

                “Eh? Fin—Finna—Geesh, what a mouthful.” Baldroy dug his ears with his pinky, looking disgruntled. “What’s a gardener to do with such a fancy name anyway?”

                “But…” The Master gave it to me… He turned to the maid, eyes wide with… nothing. He should feel something… Anger? Frustration? Agreement and despair?

                Hey, what should I feel?

                “You shouldn’t get so excited,” Mey-rin said flatly, cleaning her glasses. “It’s just a name. It’s like a kid naming his pets, to declare that you’re his.”

                Come to think of it, that butler did mention something… about the name of a dog…

                I see. That unknown and frankly quite scary feeling of elation died down, leaving behind Subject #12’s blank slate. The Young Master was just claiming him as his own. That’s okay. He belonged to the Young Master.

                All of them did.

                “Pets, eh? That’d make sense.” Baldroy lighted a cigarette, laughing bitterly. “The guard dogs of the Queen’s guard dog… I still can’t believe that brat earned that nickname.”

                “Baldroy!” Mey-rin said sharply, eyes glinting with… fear. “You do not speak of your master like that!”

                “And there’s a good little puppy, been beaten into submission, have ya?” Baldroy’s eyes were full of contempt. “But I stand corrected. We’re not guard dogs. The kid doesn’t need a guard dog when he has… that man.”

                No matter what they might think of the Master, all of them held a certain degree of respect for the butler.

                “Master Sebastian…” Mey-rin mumbled to herself. She had been reprimanded countless times for it –‘A maidservant need not address the butler so formally!’—but she can’t help it. In her world, the strong ruled, and demanded respect. They might tell you to ease up, and act natural, but once you let your guard down, they’ll show you in actions what they didn’t mean in words.

                “You’ve seen that guy at work,” Baldroy ranted. “He can cook a feast! He can clean this monstrosity in an hour! He can make the flowers bloom whenever he wants! So why would they need us? To protect the mansion when they’re not around! Hah! Well, they’re around now. So what the hell do we do?”

                He tossed a bag of flour onto the counter. “I don’t know how to cook! You don’t know how to clean! The kid over there doesn’t even know how to smile, how will he know shit about plants and flowers and shit? If you want us to fight, give us guns, not a spatula and a cloth! If there’s no fight, let us sleep or piss or get laid or something! Why this stupid, meaningless pretense?!”

                His outburst is greeted by a moment of silence, frustrated on the cook’s part, subservient on the maid’s. He always thought too much, she was taught not to think at all. As for the young gardener…

                Why does he need me? These thoughts were new, foreign. _Thinking_ was new, and rather intimidating. He never questioned his existence, because he always had a purpose—to be a test tube in an experiment. To prove those scientists right, or wrong. That was his meaning.

                A meaning that was blown up together with the laboratory.

                But the Master must have taken him in for a reason… He clutched the book closer to his chest, not realizing that the precious hardback cover was already crumpled beyond repair.

                It was in this heavy silence that the back door creaked noisily open.

                In an instant all three were tense and ready for combat. They may not know why they have their respective roles, but their shared responsibility was obvious enough.

                “…Hello?” A pretty blonde head poked into the kitchen, blue eyes wide and inquisitive. She was quite possibly the prettiest little girl all three of them have ever seen, but then again that wasn’t saying much.  “Is Ciel at home?”

                She was…

                “I’m his fiancée, Elizabeth.” She looked at them curiously, with eyes clearer than the morning sky. Not wary. Not judging.  “Are you Ciel’s new servants?”

                There was an awkward moment when the three servants, masters at taking lives and destroying property, were at a loss on how to reply to an eleven-year-old girl. Baldroy wouldn’t even look at her. Mey-rin turned away. Only the boy nodded, wordlessly. He didn’t think he had a wide enough vocabulary to deal with a noble lady yet.

                “Oh, really?” Those big blue eyes widened with such bright happiness that even the boy had to look away. No one has ever been so purely happy to know him before. “Let me guess… You’re the gardener?”

                He nodded again, surprise written all over his face. She giggled.

                “You have mud all over your shirt, silly!”

                Because he uprooted another tree this morning… He bit his lip and looked at the floor.

               “Milady!” Another young girl rushed into this kitchen, gasping for air. Out of sight, Baldroy gritted his teeth. “Milady, Master Ciel should be having his classes now! We’re far too early!”

                “I know that,” Elizabeth pouted. “I wanted to make him something to surprise him, that’s all. But wait, if he has a chef now…”

               “No problem, little lady, cuz I don’t know nuts about cooking.” Baldroy finally spoke up, and he spoke with certainty. “So you can go ahead and make whatever you want.”

                She blinked, twice, then shook her pretty little head. “It’s okay, I couldn’t cook before either! Actually…” She stuck her tongue out bashfully. “I still can’t really cook. But if it’s the two of us… Well, I think we can put something together… right?”

                Wrong, the cook wanted to answer. But when faced with those eyes, that face… That was the face of the kids he fought so hard on the battlefield to protect. Those were the eyes that would never see him again on that side of the world.

                He sighed. “I’ll try.”

                Half an hour later, he made his first batch of scrambled eggs. Sure, it took half a dozen eggs and was supposed to be an omelet, but at least it wasn’t too black.

                The pride in her smile when they were done was something he thought he had to risk his life to earn.

 

The maid was trying in vain to sweep the ceilings when the young lady entered. In her previous… occupation, her slight stature and slender build were never a disadvantage, since she was trained as a girl to handle the rebound force of every gun. In fact, being small let her slip away into the shadows that much easier.

                She never thought she would one day resent her height when she had to stand on a chair to clean.

                “Hey, you shouldn’t stand like that!”

                Elizabeth broke through her concentration, pulling her hand. “It’s unladylike!”

                “Un…lady…like?” Me? Well, of course. Back then, it didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman, as long as you could aim and shoot.

                “Yes,” the future lady of the house pulled her down impatiently. “And you’ll get dust all over that pretty dress if you don’t wear an apron or a cap!”

                “Pretty?” That was only the second time anyone said anything like that to her…

                “Yes, and you’ll look even prettier in a lot more dresses!” Elizabeth clapped her hands together, the very picture of a little girl excited to meet a new friend. “We’ll play dress-up and I’ll do your hair, and you can do mine!”

                All things that girls do… All things she never did before.

                “But… if you’re thinking of stealing Ciel from me, I won’t go easy on you!” Elizabeth put her hands on her hips, but still looked more adorable than intimidating. “Ciel is mine, because we’re fiancés!”

                Mey-rin shook her head frantically, a little scared and a little… gratified? It was nice to know that a girl as pretty and as… girly as Elizabeth thought of her as a worthy love rival. But…

                “N-not the Master…” Mey-rin’s voice became even smaller as that unfamiliar heat crept up her cheeks. “S-Sebastian…”

                That man who first told her she had beautiful eyes.

                “Ah… _Oooh_!” Elizabeth’s squeal was completely mystifying to Mey-rin. When the little lady proceeded to link their arms and whisper fervently questions like, ‘Why?’, ‘When did you meet?’, ‘What part of him do you like?’, she thought it was harder than being interrogated by her superiors.

                Harder, but somehow… nicer. Better. For once she hadn’t done anything wrong, or right, and someone was still talking to her, paying attention to her.

                Elizabeth was blabbering nonsense, talking about things that had nothing to do with their survival, had no beneficial purpose at all. She couldn’t understand it.

                “H-he’s really tall… and strong…”

                But she liked it.

                “Okay! Then next time I’ll bring lots and lots of pretty dresses, and put lots and lots of ribbons in your hair, so you’ll look prettier and maybe he’ll look at you more!”

                Was this what being a girl meant?

                “…Okay!”

 

There was a lady in the house.

                The boy was pulling weeds in the garden. It was the one thing he could do without messing up. Even still, today he was so distracted that he ground the weeds to dust in his hands before tossing the fragments into the bag.

                She had such pretty blonde hair too… And she looked so fragile…

                So breakable…

                “Boo!”

                He wasn’t surprised. Of course he had heard her coming.

                “Ehh… You’re no fun.”

                Even so, the pretty little thing crouched down beside him in the grass.

                “Hey, what’s your name? I tried asking the other two, but they told me to ask you.”

                His name… His throat felt suddenly dry.

                _“Report your number.”_

Twelve… Subject #12. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but what came out was…

                “…Finnian.” He normally took at least a day to learn a new word. This one was engraved into his mind the first time he heard it.

                “Finnian, what a nice name!” Her smile was still so bright, but when she said that name, when she was smiling at Finnian, it didn’t feel so unbearable anymore. “It’s just like that hero from the book Ciel loves!”

                “The… Master…?”

                “The Fenian Cycle, right?” She played around with the weeds, her eyes soft and sad. “Ciel used to read that book every day. My mother gave it to him, you know? He said he wanted to be just like the hero in the story…” Then she laughed. “He even bugged Aunt Rachel and asked her why he wasn’t blonde like her!”

                Finnian’s hand reached for his hair. That new and unfamiliar part of him, that feeling of safety and warmth…

                “You have really nice blonde hair.”

                It was exactly what the Young Master said.

                “I bet Ciel must be jealous, huh?”

                Was he…? Finnian didn’t think so. The Young Master had nothing to be jealous of _him_ for. But still…

                But still…!

                Looking at his grimy hands, covered with all the powdered bits of leaves, he suddenly wondered if that book was safe enough in the deepest corner of his closet. Or should he give it to someone else to take care of?  Baldroy might burn it, Mey-rin might put it in the laundry…  Sebastian? Tanaka?

                But no… He wanted to keep it. He wanted to see it every day…

                _“I hope you can learn how to read it soon.”_

He was going to read it.

                _“Is that okay?”_

It might take him forever, but he was going to learn how to read it! And then he’ll read it every day, again and again…

                _“Finnian.”_

But what if he dirties it? What if he tears it, with these hands… these hands…

                “Finnian!” Elizabeth grabbed his arm suddenly. “Look there! In the middle of those weeds! It’s a four-leaf clover!”

                So pretty… And so fragile…

                Determination flashed in his eyes.

 

“Ciel!”

                “Lizzie?” Ciel was genuinely surprised. “It’s not even two yet!”

                “I got here early, so I could see you more.” She beamed. “Look what Finny picked for me!”

                “Fi—Oh, you mean, Finnian.” He looked at the little clover, all four leaves intact, and there was something in his smirk… something Finnian liked…

                “So you’re Finny? Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Baldroy put a hand on his shoulder gruffly. “Now that ain’t too hard to remember…”

                “Finny.” Mey-rin repeated quietly. She knew they shouldn’t be eavesdropping on their master and his fiancée, but this time she knew for sure that they wouldn’t be punished if they got caught. And besides, Sebastian was there…

                “Bar-d-r…” Finnian scrunched his face up in concentration, finally relenting, “…Bard. And Mey-rin.”

                “Hey! Why do you remember her name and not my--”

                “Shh!”

                Lady Elizabeth was talking about them.

                “…and Baldroy helped me make your breakfast! It might not taste very good, but he tried his best… Hey, Ciel?”

                “Hmm?”

                “I’m glad you found them.”

                On the other side of the door, all the servants were holding their breaths.

                “I don’t know where you found them, or how… but I like them. They’re nice, and honest, and they really like you.”

                Mey-rin nudged Baldroy in the side.

                “And… they make this place feel less lonely.” A bright smile. “They make you feel less lonely!”

                “Lizzie…” Ciel sighed, but his gaze was gentler than the servants have ever seen it. “I’m never lonely.”

                It was a lie, to make her feel better, and everyone knew it. And still she giggled, and still they smiled at each other.

                That was when they decided to protect this place. This place, right here and now, when the manor was beautiful, Elizabeth was happy, and Ciel was well. They were not naïve enough to think that things would stay the way they were forever—A little boy who could employ servants like them wasn’t going to grow up normally. But they could at least play their parts, to make the mealtimes more fun, to make the mansion cleaner, to make the gardens grow…

                To make Lady Elizabeth happy, to make the Young Master happy.

                They would protect those smiles, and if Sebastian has Ciel covered, then they’ll make sure to protect the lady’s smile.

 

Three weeks later, when the Phantomhive servants were in town on errands and came across their lady nearly slicing off a pickpocket’s hand, they unanimously decided to pretend they didn’t see a thing.


End file.
